the movement comes in slow
by b.inoriginality
Summary: future fic, a little au: One vulnerable Miley plus one smiling Nick equals one big painful mess.


_If you love her let her go _  
_She's beautifully composed _  
_A tune that only caged birds know_

_- My Love Goes Free, Jon Foreman_

It's funny how everything tends to happen at once. You can go for years without incident, without tragedy or upheaval, and you think, _finally_, your life might be on track. And then everything comes down on you in one massive shit storm.

Your boyfriend of two years cheats on you. Your movie bombs with both critics and audiences, and the scripts promptly stop coming. And you learn one of your parents is dying.

"I think you should come home," Miley's father said quietly, over the phone on a rainy Tuesday night. Tuesday. She'd just received supposedly earth-shattering news, and all she could think was, _Five more fucking days until this week is over._

"Miley?" he asked. "Did you hear me?"

"I heard you," she managed, and her voice sounded colder than she meant it to. "And I'm moving on and pretending you never said it. How's the weather over there?"

He sighed into the phone, and she could almost see him rubbing a hand over his shaggy head. Tears stung her eyes, and she had a sudden, fierce urge to see her father, to be there to feel his arms around her. But not if it meant she had to see Tish at the same time.

"I know you guys have had your differences," he said softly.

"Then why even ask me to come?" She could feel her own voice catching in her throat, and she knew without a doubt her father could hear it as well. "What's the point?"

"For you," he said simply. "I don't want you to wake up in ten years and realize you regret it. You should have the chance to say goodbye."

*

Her father was there to meet her at the airport two days later. It was a long flight from Nashville to LA, but she would have gladly sat on that plane for three days straight if it meant she never had to see her mother again. But her dad seemed hell bent on closure, and he'd always had the ability to make her see things from his point of view.

She burst into tears the minute she saw him.

He was half-laughing as he embraced her, grabbing her bag with his free hand. "Aw sweetheart, honey, calm down. Everything's going to be alright."

"I'm just really happy to see you," she choked out, wiping tears on his shoulder.

"You'd think _I_ was the one dying," he half-joked, half-chided, giving her another squeeze.

"Stop it," she said fiercely. "That's not funny. This has nothing to do with her." The tears were coming faster than she could wipe them away. It was a good thing blotchy faces were a dime a dozen in the airport, or else she'd be causing a major scene.

"I know," her father whispered, brushing the hair out of her eyes. "Let's go home. Noah's making dinner for us."

*

Noah cooked, and her father did the dishes. Apparently that was the daily routine now in the Cyrus household.

"I've been visiting your mom since she went in the hospital the last time," her father said, not looking up from the salad bowl he was currently wiping down.

She scrubbed a little harder at the spaghetti sauce-stained dinner plate. "Does Noah go with you?," she asked, but her voice wasn't obeying. The question was supposed to sound smooth and nonchalant; instead it sounded like her vocal chords had snagged on a broken bottle.

"Sometimes," her father said vaguely, somehow effortlessly achieving the exact tone she'd been striving for.

"Then she must know something I don't," Miley said shortly. "Because I still have no idea why I'm here. I don't owe her anything." Somewhere, in the back of her mind, she knew that if she didn't stop scrubbing, the painted flowers were going to start chipping off the porcelain, but she couldn't seem to still her hands.

Her father was watching her sadly. "I think we're past who owes who, at this point," he said quietly, and Miley got the sickening feeling that he was disappointed in her. "She's your mama."

"She's not!" She wiped furiously at the tears starting to slide out of her eyes again. There was a horrible band stretching inside of her, right through the center of her stomach like taffy pulling. She wished to God it would just snap. Anything was better than this horrible emptiness, this not knowing.

"She wants to see you," he added.

"Good," she said, as coldly as she could muster. Which wasn't very, considering how muffled with tears her voice was. "Now she knows how I felt when she left in the middle of the night when I was seventeen years old."

Her father was shaking his head. "You're a grown-up," he said, and for the first time he sounded defeated. "I won't tell you what to do." He looked up at her with a small smile. "You never listened anyhow."

She picked up the dish and sponge again, and she felt his hand on her wrist.

"Please jus' think about it," he said. "For me."

*

"Hey, Nighthawk, what's this I hear about you getting into a street brawl?" Demi asked over the phone. "You call the director a jackass, or something?"

"It's nice to hear you have such faith in me," she answered dryly.

"I mean it," she said seriously. "What happened?"

"Oh, you know," she said glibly. "Same old story. Actress goes out for dinner. Actress comes back; finds producer sleeping with her boyfriend. Actress and producer get into it in front of paparazzi. Producer denies everything to the studio; actress takes the fall for the scandal." She took a deep, shaky breath. "Actress has to find new career, since she's now on the shit list of every studio in the country."

Demi was silent for a minute. Then she said, "Want me to go kick her ass?"

Miley gave her best attempt at a laugh. "I'll take it under consideration."

"Hey," Demi said. "I'm sorry about your mom."

"Yeah," she said softly. "I seem to be on everyone's shit list lately. Including God's."

"Nah," she replied. "You just never learned to trust the right people, that's all."

"Great. I take it you're not including yourself in that little assessment."

"Of course not,"

"My dad wants me to go see her," Miley confessed.

"Your dad's a smart guy. " Demi paused, "You going to do it?"

Miley didn't answer, but she could almost see her best friend smiling through the phone.

*

It was one thing to cut your cheating, abandoning, thieving, alcoholic mother out of your life when she had scammed you out of millions of dollars in royalties. It was another when she was lying in a blue-lit hospital room, sunken, defeated, and so thin she barely made a bump under the woven blanket.

"It's so good to see you," Tish said, when Miley was seated in the chair by the bed. The ravages of chemotherapy had left her almost unrecognizable, and her voice was so weak that Miley had to lean closer to hear her over the humming of the machines keeping her alive.

"Daddy said you were asking for me," she said uncomfortably. "Here I am."

"Here you are," her mother said, with a note of such tenderness that Miley almost got up and walked out right then.

"How are you feeling?"

"It's not too bad today," Tish sighed. "It comes and goes." Miley wanted to scream in the muffled silence of the room, but her vocal chords were as locked up as the rest of her body.

"But I don't want to talk about me. I want to talk about you," her mother said, her voice brightening a fraction. "Tell me. Your father says you've got a new movie out?" She still sounded entirely too weak, and Miley felt infuriating pity start to creep in, to soften her.

"Look, I'm not – I'm not here to …do whatever," Miley said suddenly. "Talk about old times. Cry."

"Sweetheart, I didn't expect you to," her mother answered, tired and utterly unsurprised.

"Then what?" she asked sharply. "What could we possibly have to say to each other right now?"

"I know you can't forgive me," her mother said, barely audible under all that sorrow and regret. "All I want is to talk to you. You're my daughter, like it or not. This is my last chance."

It was amazing how all the emotions could hit you at once. The sorrow and the fury and the fear and horrible inevitability. It all welled up in her at the same time; choking her, cutting off everything except that terrible, keening pressure in her chest. When her vision finally cleared, her mother was still looking at her, expectant and pleading.

"You missed your last chance a long time ago," Miley said, and walked out the door.

She made it through an entire week before she ran into Nick. Noah and her father were doing their best to coddle her through every second of this visit, but Miley could only take so much walking on eggshells before she went insane. When Noah absently mentioned she wanted more vegan yogurt, Miley had the keys to her father's truck in hand and one foot out the door before Noah even had time to stutter out the brand name.

Twenty minutes later, she was regretting it. There had to be thirty different types of yogurt in all colors, shapes, and sizes stacked up under the fluorescent lights in the dairy aisle. Vanilla, peach, lemon-lime, whipped, fat-free, and extra creamy. All made with milk. No soy in sight. She'd left her cell phone in her hurry to get out of the house, and she was about to give up and head over to the teeming customer service desk when she saw the abandoned shopping cart.

There were all sorts of healthy things inside – fruits and vegetables, boneless, skinless chicken breasts, a few bottles of seltzer water and, sitting right on top, a six-pack of vanilla soy yogurt.

She took a glance around, but there was no one in sight. She'd never had a problem making quick decisions. She'd already wasted almost half an hour and, after all, this customer clearly _already _knew where the soy yogurt was located. It's not like they couldn't go find a replacement.

She very innocently sidled over to the cart and, in one smooth motion, reached in and plucked the yogurt off the top of the pile.

"I see you've added thievery to your resume," a deep voice behind her said. "Really, I guess there was no place else for your career to go _but_ petty crime."

She'd never known how _awful_ a blush could feel until that moment. The heat started somewhere in the center of her stomach and spread to every inch of her skin until she was ready to burst into flames. Really, she was pretty sure her toes were blushing. Because every instinct, every memory in her head, was telling her that she'd just stolen soy yogurt from Nick Jonas' shopping cart.

She considered bolting. She considered pretending to not know who he was. She considered a lot of attractive and thoroughly ridiculous options, but in the end, there was no choice but to turn around and face him.

"I-I'm sorry," she stammered. "I was trying to find the soy yogurt, and I saw you had it in your cart, and - " He raised his eyebrows, patient and amused, and she guiltily set the yogurt back down.

"Those soy products _can_ be tricky," he said easily.

Forget dying mothers and having her personal pictures splashed across the news. This – this right here – _this_ was the worst moment of her life. "Definitely," she said, strangled.

"Non-dairy," he smirked. "Health food aisle."

"Oh," she said faintly.

She was pretty sure her face was almost purple with mortification by now. He, on the other hand, looked irritatingly unruffled, like he'd woken up today expecting to run into his first love lifting yogurt from his shopping cart. Now _that_ was annoying. Of all the ways she'd envisioned running into Nick Jonas again, floundering around for one-sentence answers under his raised eyebrows was not one of them.

"How are you, Miley?" he asked.

She might as well be honest; she had no dignity to lose at this point. "Oh, you know – embarrassed," she said, with as much carelessness as she could muster, given the situation.

"I wouldn't worry," he advised her. "On the list of weird things I've seen you do, this one doesn't even make the top ten." She felt her shoulders un-knot a little.

"I'm sorry," she offered again, and he waved her apology off.

"I'm much less shocked to see you stealing my groceries than I am to see you in LA at all," he pointed out. "I thought you only came back for industry stuff – nothing longer than 24 hours."

She hesitated."That's usually true," she said with difficulty. "This is the first time I've really been back in years." Five years, to be precise. The exact amount of time since their final failed "reconnection". But she wasn't about to open that can of worms.

"But my family's still here," she pushed on brightly. "I can't expect them to fly to Nashville all the time, right?"

She had a sinking suspicion that her hazy explanation wasn't fooling him for one second, but all he said was, "Right."

Silence.

He had a plastic-wrapped loaf of bread in his hands, and he took the moment to toss it into his cart. And that's when it hit her.

"Wait," she said abruptly. "This is _your_ cart?"

He raised an eyebrow. "It would be kind of cruel to accuse you of stealing from me if it wasn't."

"It's just so…healthy," she said doubtfully. "I mean…soy yogurt?"

"What did you think I ate?" he asked, amused all over again.

"Diet Coke and coffee," she said bluntly, and he laughed.

God, she'd forgotten how magnetic he could be when he looked like that. He was leaning against the nearest shelf, all hard lines and confidence, warm brown eyes and crooked smile. Draped in a Yankees t-shirt and jeans, he barely looked like he'd aged. He was still disturbingly attractive, and she suddenly realized what she was doing. She was standing in the middle of the dairy aisle, smiling goofily at Nick Jonas, and remembering a little too vividly what it felt like to have all that sexual energy focused on her.

He broke the moment first, looking down, and it jolted her back into the fluorescent lights and faint music of the supermarket. "I should probably go," she said a little too quickly. "My family will think I jumped on the next plane back to Nashville"

"Right," he said, a curious flatness to his voice. "I take it you won't be here long, then."

_Until my mother dies_, she thought. "Not long," she said.

"So I guess I won't be seeing you," he continued, not looking at her. There was something in his voice that she told herself was absolutely _not_ disappointment. Because she and Nick Jonas had finished disappointing each other years ago. That hollow feeling in her own stomach had to be something else entirely.

"Probably not," she said, forcing an airy tone. It was amazing she could manage it, when her heart felt like lead.

He gave a little nod. "Okay. Well…good to see you, Miley."

"You too," she said softly, and was shocked by how much she meant it.

He looked like he wanted to speak again, but instead he lifted the yogurt out of his cart and lightly tossed it to her. She caught it, surprised. "Keep it," he said with a rueful smile. "Parting gift."

She could only nod as he turned around and started pushing his cart away from her. He only made it three steps, though, before he turned back around.

"I'm having lunch," he said carefully. "If you're hungry."

She did the mental math in her head. One dying mother plus one box office failure plus one sound cuckolding all add up to one vulnerable Miley. One vulnerable Miley plus one unpredictable teenage flame equals one potential disaster.

But he was doing his forced-casual thing; shuffling his feet, pretending to read food labels, fiddling with the sleeves of his shirt, and she suddenly couldn't bear to say no. This visit was all about closure, right? And Nick was basically a dangling rope of unfinished issues. It wasn't like he could throw anything at her that she hadn't seen yet.

She smiled tentatively. "Okay."

*

"So, how's your love life?" he asked, and she almost choked on her sandwich.

When he'd invited her for lunch, she'd expected sushi or thai, LA style. One light course and a glass of wine, an hour of chit-chit chat and out the door. At the very least she'd expected some sort of elaborate creation from Nick's hired chef, complete with toothpick garnish.

Instead, she got peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread. "Are you serious?" she'd asked him, when he'd set out the plastic jars on the gleaming marble counter of his enormous kitchen.

He'd shrugged. "It's all I know how to make. Grape jelly, or strawberry?"

"The _only_ thing? That's sad."

He'd smirked and opened his fridge for her to see. "Last I remember you weren't particularly gifted in the culinary arts yourself. But if you've learned to cook in the last five years, feel free to show me up, Cyrus."

So they'd ended up eating PB&J on stools in the middle of the kitchen, and, apparently they'd tacitly decided to broach the topic of love lives as well. She reached inside of herself for her stock polite answer: _Fine, everything's great, dating Tennessee guys is a blast, I may never settle down!_

Instead, what came out was, "My boyfriend of two years just broke up with me. He'd been cheating on me."

"Well," he said, pausing to chew then swallow, "you really should have seen that coming."

She gaped. "What?"

He looked at her, surprised. "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought we'd reached the brutal honesty portion of the conversation."

She couldn't seem to close her mouth. The sound that came out of her throat was half-laugh, half-choke. "I can't believe you just said that to me."

His eyes were glinting at her. "Wow, you're out of practice at this."

She was too busy floundering from his first remark to even deal with his second. "I'm serious, Nick. What the hell did you mean by that?"

He sighed and leaned forward a bit. "Miley," he said, very gently, "you don't trust people anymore. If you treat every guy in your life like they're going to let you down, eventually they will." She looked for the smirk, for the little signs that said he was just saying these things to bait her. But his gaze was totally open, and a little sad.

She had to forcibly relax every muscle in her body before she could speak again. "I was completely faithful to him for _two years_," she gritted out. "You don't think that counts?"

He shrugged. "I absolutely believe you didn't cheat. That's not the same as being faithful."

She clenched her teeth. "What do you even mean?" Her stomach was beginning to knot in an unpleasant and entirely familiar way.

"Actual faith takes trust," he said sharply, and she got her first hint that he wasn't completely unaffected by this conversation. "I know you, and you haven't trusted someone for real since we were 18."

"It's not like you've done much better for yourself," she bit out. "Unless you're hiding a happy family somewhere that I can't see." He winced, and the knot in her stomach pulled a little tighter. But she was too far gone to stop her mouth now.

"And another thing," she said, her voice beginning to shake with anger. "Don't try and project our problems onto every other relationship in my life. You haven't seen me for _five years_. You don't know what I've done or how I've grown or anything about me. Just because I could never trust _you_- "

She stopped short, breathing hard. His face had gone slack. She put a palm against her forehead and pressed, trying to stave off the massive headache she could feel approaching. "I'm sorry," she said in a low voice. "I didn't mean that." He was still looking at her with that ridiculous puppy dog expression.

"You know what?" she muttered, grabbing her purse. "This was a bad idea." She started to slide off the bar stool, but he grabbed her wrist, thick fingers swallowing up the bones and flesh. It was the first time he'd touched her, and she froze.

"Don't," he said, and his eyes were pleading. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to start something. Let's just," he blew out all his air. "Let's try and behave, all right? It's been five years. I want to know about your life, Miley."

"Why?" she said flatly.

He took a few seconds to answer, and she got the feeling he was scrambling for an acceptable answer. Finally, he settled on a vague, "My life has been…different lately. I just…I'm curious, all right? Can we just try this again? Please?"

Her headache wasn't going anywhere, and his fingers were still wrapped around her wrist. She did a quick recap of all the reasons she should not stay in this house. They couldn't spend more than five minutes together without fighting. Together, they probably had more baggage than every other ex- Disney star combined. Nothing good would come of it. Despite five years and thousands of miles of distance, she still dreamed of him sometimes, and the expression he had on his face right now, sharp and soulful and invasive. Compelling, and entirely too dangerous.

Very slowly, she slid back onto her stool, and she saw his shoulders relax. "Only because you said 'please'," she conceded evenly, and he smiled. He opened his mouth to speak, but she held up her hand. "But can we not talk about this? Let's try something else, okay?" He looked at her for an odd, still moment, then seemed to decide something, and closed his mouth. Smart man.

"Okay," he said.

The silence that followed was anything but comfortable. She looked at the clock on the microwave, the geometric pattern on the tiles, the hideous aquatic bronze sculpture sitting in the middle of his kitchen table.

She felt him nudge her shoulder. "Come on," he said, smiling gently. "It's time for the special homeowner's tour."

"Let me guess," she asked half-heartedly. "Extra time in the bedroom?"

That put the smirk right back on his face. "Getting the hang of the teasing thing again," he said. "Nice. A few more days and you'll be tearing me to shreds. Just like old times."

She actually laughed as she followed him out of the kitchen.

*

It took almost an hour to make it through Nick's house. It was a lot of room for one person; too much, she decided, and she told him so, when they finally sat down to rest in the largest of his three living rooms.

He touched the sharp edge of the coffee table. "Yeah," he said softly. "It probably is."

They actually managed to hold a civil conversation, about their lives and their projects and their plans. She told him about her accidental foray into street fighting; he told her all about Joe convincing him to invest in his rock club, and how it had turned into a side career.

She narrowed her eyes. "Let me get this straight: you own the whole club, and you've _never seen it_?"

"Five clubs, actually."

"So…who runs them?"

"The people I hire to run them."

"And then you live off the profits."

"Right."

She put her hands flat on the table and leveled her gaze at him. "So what you're really saying is that you're getting paid for having money in the first place."

He threw his head back and laughed. "I don't think anyone's ever put it quite like that, but…yeah, that's about it."

She shook her head and smirked at him. "Hollywood kids."

He smiled, but it didn't touch his eyes. She knew what was coming an instant before he opened his mouth.

He tipped his head to the side. "Why are you really here, Miley?" he said, genuine curiosity in his voice. "Somehow I doubt you missed LA."

She almost didn't answer. There was no reason on earth to tell him. She'd be gone in a few days, and he hadn't been privy to her secrets in years. But for some reason, she wanted him to know. There was a certain gravity mixed in with the smugness in his eyes that had never been there before. A softness that said he'd suffered, too, without her there to see it, or help him through it. He'd had plenty of faults when they were dating, but he'd never, ever used her personal weaknesses against her; with this, she trusted him.

"My mother's dying," she said, and for once the words came out clearly, went right from her mouth to his ears without struggle.

He reacted without reacting. He didn't move a muscle, but the look in his eyes said he was just a breath from…something. From touching her, maybe. She saw him swallow once, take a deep breath.

"I, uh, I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't know, I mean, I didn't think you two were – "

"We're not," she said, cutting off his fumbling speech. "But Daddy wanted me to come, so I'm here." It was easy to tell him, really. It was the cleanest she'd felt since her father had broken the news.

He searched her face for a few weighted seconds, and it hit her again how old they both were, almost twenty five years old in real time, but hundreds of years in experience. He was trying to pick up a signal from her, something to tell him what to do with this particular brand of catastrophe. He'd never been very good at saying the right thing outside of his lyrics, but when it was important, he always seemed to come through. Today was no different.

He cleared his throat. "How come you were never that easy to control when we were dating?" he asked roughly, and she laughed. He reached across the table and took her hand, enfolded her small, cold fingers in his own, big and warm and so tender that she felt a piercing longing shoot right through her. "I'm sorry," he said again, holding her eyes.

She smiled. "Thank you."

She remembered Dallas, out of nowhere, it was all so familiar – his hand and hers, his body and hers, the two of them figuring out a way to keep standing still when everything else was going crazy around them.

She couldn't help but wonder, for a moment, if _this_ was the reason she'd been duped and dumped, the reason she hadn't been able to settle down with anyone, ever. Maybe part of her heart would always be shaped like his smile, would always be reserved in case she needed to help keep him standing. Maybe part of her would always reach out to him to keep her standing as well. She reminded herself of the equation again. One vulnerable Miley plus one smiling Nick equals one big painful mess. But she couldn't feel anything but happy that he was here, and that he still seemed to have some of himself reserved for her, too.

The room was starting to deepen with shadows when she turned to find him smiling softly at her. "What?" she asked, even though she knew.

That look was trouble. That look meant soft sheets and skin sliding against skin, heat and friction and that gritty little moan that only he had ever been able to pull out of her. That look was the reason she shouldn't be here, the reason she should have turned and ran the second he invited her to lunch.

That look was the reason she still wasn't running.

"Nothing," he shrugged, still smiling. "It's just – it's good to see you. I never thought you'd be back here."

"That makes two of us," she said, forcing a dry tone. "I still can't believe we're sitting down, catching up like real grown-ups.

He turned serious in the space of a second. "I can believe it," he said, very intently, and she felt the impact of his gaze shiver all up and down her spine. Warning signals were going off all over her brain, but she didn't have a prayer of walking away now. He must have seen something in her face, because he looked down suddenly, a wry twist to his lips.

"I don't know," he said, running his hands back and forth along the table's edge like he was searching out some sort of message. There were so many memories locked up in his hands that she had to look away. "I just-" he said abruptly, shifting impatiently in his seat, "I just always assumed there was another chance coming. For us. I didn't know it was the last time, until…" the words stopped, but the struggle in his eyes didn't.

"Until…" she said, coiled tightly. She was almost certain she didn't want to hear this, but she was even more certain she'd never sleep again until she did.

"Until you left," he said with a small smile, and despite all the warning signals she felt like she'd been sucker punched. There wasn't enough air in the room for her to deal with his meaningful glances and too-late confessions. There wasn't enough air for the two of them to share here, and she was suddenly suffocating, drowning right next to him on dry land.

"I knew, then, that it was really over. For good," he said. "But I just - " His eyes were all over her face, and it wasn't doing anything to help with the whole breathing situation. "I wish I had known," he said quietly. "I know it wouldn't have changed anything, to try and convince you to stay, but…" he finally looked away. "I still wish-."

"It would have changed things," she murmured without meaning to. "If you had called or something then, it – it would have changed things."

He stared at her for a painful, shell-shocked moment, and it ran through her in one instant, all the paths their futures could have taken if life and history and their own stupid tendencies hadn't kept getting in the way. She felt light-headed, and she was pretty sure that if she didn't do something, speak or move or drag her eyes away from his face, she'd have about ten seconds before her mouth was on his and they were using each other for oxygen.

He saved her. He laughed the moment off, short and rueful, and the atmosphere in the room seemed to loosen.

"I guess it all ended well anyway, right?" There was the barest hint of a question in his voice. She thought about her failed relationship and her career in tatters, her dying mother and her disappointed family, and how there was nothing waiting for her back in Tennessee.

"Yeah," she forced out. "Sure."

"Right," he said again, still watching her with that unnerving intensity.

It hit her again, in one blinding moment of clarity, how risky this was, how dangerous and stupid. She stood up so abruptly that she saw stars. "I should, I have to- to go. Noah's waiting," she fumbled.

He stood with her. "No, of course. You should go."

She didn't want to leave. She resisted the urge to drag her feet as he walked her to the foyer. There was a faintly resigned look to his brown eyes that struck a chord of memory so deep in her she'd forgotten she'd buried it. It was the look he'd given her when backstage in Connecticut forever ago, a last backwards glance before he was shoved through the green room door. The look he'd given her when he walked away from her at the Teen Choice Awards two years later, after she'd told him about Liam. Like he'd known it was coming, but hadn't been able to stop it from hurting anyway.

"Bye." Her voice felt like sandpaper. He leaned down and kissed her on the cheek, brief and final, and that was all it took. His lips on her skin, and she was kissing him, kissing him for real, with lips and teeth and hot mingling breath. Her hands on his face and his arms around her back and nothing but scant layers of cloth and more than ten years of history between them.

Then she was gone, running down the steps with her heart slamming against her rib cage and his scent still marking her.

* * *

**A/N: i love tish, and i wish nothing but the best for the cyrus family, sorry for using their misery as a literary device. **

**so, i was cleaning out the old google docs and oh look, a niley story. thought i'd share it here. there's another part that i'll finish if people are enjoying this super random vaguely tragic universe.**

**for people wondering why my twitter is defunct, i deleted it after receiving not one, not two, but THREE messages where i was told i was a "nick-loving-bitch", which ... thank you? man, miley-liam fans are hardcore. for the record, while i may take issue with certain choices/comments miley has made recently, i don't think i said anything against liam. i'm not waving pom-poms or writing about them (because frankly they're not that interesting) but liam seems like a decent guy and i ultimately have no vested interest in who miley cyrus dates. **

**to everyone who sent love and support, it meant even more than usual during this random outbreak of cyberbullying, so thank you, haha.**

**love, your favorite nick-loving-bitchhh (:**


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